 My name is Jeff Weiss, I'm a 30 plus year IT professional and I've done pretty much every job in our field that you can imagine. I came from the era before DOS so you can tell how long I've been doing this. I've done every kind of networking there is out there and I've worked with all the major operating systems and all the major platforms. Today, my primary focus is Windows, Microsoft Technologies and Virtualization. I'm actually the executive vice president in charge of a bunch of companies but the primary one involved with this is VM training. We provide all kinds of training across the virtualization landscape as well as Microsoft and Cisco Technologies. All of them are boot camp oriented so you want to check out the catalog for all the different boot camps that are available through Career Academy. Now my experience in specific is not only just training but also consulting. So I like to bring a lot of experience to the table when we're doing our trainings. In this chapter one, we're going to cover the overview of what we're going to cover throughout the rest of the course. Like many of the classes you've taken in the past which use a show, do, review type of methodology, we do the same thing. We just call it, learn it, do it, know it. And there are expert tips sprinkled throughout the class so you may want to keep your eyes out for that. We have a certification exam called the Certified Virtualization Expert or CVE. The exam is 80 questions, we give you two hours to complete it and you need a 75% to pass. The exam is actually taken depending on where you are at typically the partner site and it uses the same methodology we use for doing labs. If you need to purchase the voucher for the exam, you can go to VMtraining.net slash cart. Again, you have two hours to complete it and you need a 75% to pass. To get the certification, you need to take both this course and pass the exam. The physical setup of our lab environment is that we have Dell throughout. We have a series of Dell R610 servers. We also have a Dell R810 server, although that may have changed slightly by the time you viewed this course. Storage is all based on iSCSI. We have three separate iSCSI setups right now. One is virtual and two are physical. All our hosts are running the current version of ESXi and vCenter. Right now that's 5.5 and 5.5B for vCenter. We're actually going to be upgrading to update one very soon. The setup of our environment is such that when you do the labs, it's a picture of you up top. You connect through the internet using remote desktop protocol. You're connecting to a terminal server in our environment and that terminal server itself is actually a virtual machine. Everything we have in our environment is virtualized. There are no physical servers other than the hosts which are running ESXi. All we have, including our corporate environment, is there as well and everything is virtualized. For those of you that care about the IP setup, this is a do as I say and not as I do. We have our setup as a one large Class B broadcast based network. Now you wouldn't do that in the real world in a production environment. But you see the slash 16, we use the third octet as a way of actually logically subnetting what we have in our environment. So we have an idea when we look at the third octet, which of the servers we're working with. Now if you're taking the labs, you'll notice the pound sign throughout. That will be the student number, server number, that's assigned to you before you start taking the labs. The X relates to this terminal server number you'll be connecting through. If also you are taking the labs, there are several lab terms you need to understand. The first one is RDP in 2. That relates to the remote desktop protocol. Now we've created these terms so that there would be many standards that are used throughout the labs so that we can be consistent. There are many different places that you'll need to connect to and without some kind of consistency you'd get lost very rapidly. Even with these terms you need to be careful as to which thing you're connecting to and which term we're using in the lab manual. Remote desktop protocol is the first one. That's how you get into the entire environment. Once you're in the environment, we have other terms that we use throughout. DRAC into relates to the Dell Remote Access Card. Since we have Dell servers throughout, we use a remote access card to get into the physical servers. Now if you're assigned virtual servers, there will be no Dell Remote Access Card. In that case you'll be opening a console to a virtual machine. VIC refers to virtual infrastructure client. It's the old term that we use for the .NET or FAT client on the desktop that you would install to be able to connect to either a standalone host or a centralized vCenter. The term to use these days is vSphere client. But we like to say Vic into because it keeps it separated from the term vSphere which is often confused by many people. If you've worked with Putty in the past you know that this is simply an SSH client from which you can connect to any host and get to the command line remotely through SSL. Finally we have console into. Often we need you to work inside a virtual machine or VM. When you do that you need to open a console to it. Since many of our VMs are running Windows you may also have to log into using a normal Windows login. Browse to is simply using the browser. The pound sign is going to be the number you're assigned. The X is the terminal server number that you're connecting to. And yes you need to know the Windows key since we are now using Windows 2012 and you'll need that key to be able to access certain features. Now the last thing on the list is help. And what we're saying here is in the lab manual it looks like there's a dash space dash and then the word help. In reality when you're at the command line you're actually going to type dash dash help. There's no space in between. It was just typed that way in the lab manual for clarity. Other lab conventions used throughout the labs are notes, alerts, hints, important, and stop. Now if it does say stop the reason it does before it gets to the end of the lab is simply that these labs have been written from all the way back in version 2.5 of ESX. As a result there is still some information in there that's great for reference but not needed for the labs. And you'll notice at the bottom of the slide is an explanation. Now normally when you're doing labs you would do step numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and each step would tell you exactly what you need to do. In our case in this particular example you'll notice that step 6 has a description of what you're about to do and the actual steps are the lettered steps below. So if you reach anything in the lab manual that is a number and has letters below it's the letters that walk you through how to do it. Don't struggle on just the numbered sequence above.